Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Testing Group-Level Differences in Political Decision-Making

公民赋予民选官员作出重要决策的权力。民选官员应该领导和代表他们的选民，部分原因是直接民主对一个大国来说是不切实际的。间接代表制的后果是什么？如果普通公民制定政策，他们的决策过程和选择会不会与民选官员的过程和选择不同？通过一种创新的实验设计，该项目测试了民选官员和普通公民在决策方面的差异程度。民选官员和普通公民的决策背景或情况是不同的，但总的来说，他们的决策能力不应该有什么不同。因此，问题是民选官员和普通公民在他们的决策过程中是否同样受到相同背景的影响。该项目侧重于民选官员熟悉的两个背景：对个人决定的问责以及事关重大和后果的情况。该项目测试了这样一个命题，即在责任感和高风险的背景下，焦虑程度较低的人最有能力从新信息中学习。为此，该项目调查了焦虑对民选官员和普通公民决策质量的影响。主要的假设是，当选官员的决策经验会导致较低的平均经历焦虑水平。因此，与普通公民在相同情况下搜索和学习信息的模式相比，民选官员寻求信息和学习信息的模式应较少受到问责制和高利害关系的影响。为了检验这些假设，该项目使用了一个计算机化的信息板，该信息板描述了一系列假设的公共政策问题，并列出了可以解决这些问题的潜在选择。共有400名参与者从两组平均抽样，即从明尼苏达州普通成人人口中抽样的普通公民和在明尼苏达州任职的州和地方一级的民选官员，他们被要求在决策情景中扮演民选官员的角色。这项研究是政治学中第一个比较直选官员和普通公民政治决策的研究。一场重要的辩论围绕着这样一个观点：当选官员是利用洞察力和信息来代表我们做出决定的“受托人”，还是只是充当选民替身的“代表”。无论是哪种方式，公民都暗自相信民选官员会做出至少和他们自己可能做的一样好、甚至更好的决定。由于我们对个人政治决策的异同知之甚少，我们只能猜测，与我们目前的间接民主制度相比，更直接的民主形式会是什么样子。该项目有助于实现这一重要目标，即确定公民在公共政策中反映其偏好的最佳方式。

Citizens entrust elected officials with the power to make important decisions. Elected officials are supposed to lead as well as to represent their constituents in part because direct democracy is impractical for a large country. What are the consequences of indirect representation? If ordinary citizens made policies, would their decision making processes and choices differ from elected officials' processes and choices? Through an innovative experimental design, this project tests the extent to which elected officials and everyday citizens differ in their decision-making. The contexts or situations of decision-making for elected officials and everyday citizens are distinct, but in general, their decision-making abilities should not differ. Thus, the question is whether elected officials and everyday citizens are equally affected in their decision-making by the same contexts. This project focuses on two contexts familiar to elected officials: accountability for one's decisions and situations with high stakes and consequences. The project tests the proposition that individuals who experience lower levels of anxiety in contexts of accountability and high stakes are best able to learn from new information. To this end, the project examines the effects of anxiety on the quality of decision-making among both elected officials and ordinary citizens. The main hypothesis is that elected officials' experience with decision-making to lead to lower average levels of experienced anxiety. Thus, elected officials' patterns of information-seeking and learning from information should be less affected by contexts of accountability and high stakes, as compared to everyday citizens' patterns of information search and learning in the same contexts. To test these hypotheses, the project uses a computerized information board, which describes a series of hypothetical public policy problems and lists potential options that could solve them. A total of 400 participants are sampled equally from two groups, everyday citizens sampled from the general adult populations of Minnesota and elected officials serving in Minnesota at the state and local level and are asked to role-play the part of an elected official during the decision scenarios. This study is the first research in political science to compare directly elected officials' and everyday citizens' political decision-making. An important debate revolves around the idea of whether elected officials are "trustees" who use insight and information to make decisions on our behalf or "delegates" who merely act as stand-ins for constituents. Either way, citizens implicitly trust elected officials to make decisions that are at least as good, if not better than what they themselves might do. Because we know little about the similarities and differences in individuals' political decision-making, we can only speculate what a more direct form of democracy would look like compared to our present system of indirect democracy. This project contributes to this important goal of determining the best way for citizens to have their preferences reflected in public policy.